Tag: Salman Rushdie

Posted on

Posterity or Prizes?

It’s that time of the year when the Booker Prize shortlist is announced, which, like the Nobel literature prize announcement, always makes me wonder about the point of literary prizes at all.

There’s an argument in favour of course, and those in the running for the Booker would perhaps be among the first to make it. We’re in an era when fewer and fewer people read books, and of those that do, fewer and fewer read contemporary literary fiction. Surely anything that promotes such literature and brings it to the general public’s attention can only be a good thing? We might call this the ‘Harry Potter’ argument, after the longstanding axiom that, were it not for JK Rowling’s wizarding world, the entirety of Gen Z would be functionally illiterate.

Readadamn Bookium!

There’s also a concomitant self-serving argument on behalf of the authors, as I said. It’s not very lucrative to write literary fiction. In fact, it’s a very poor decision, careerwise, if you think about it. The average published author in Britain makes about £7,000 a year. That’s not very much when you consider that the average rent is around £1,400 per month.

Now, when we subtract people like Rowling, or Julia Donaldson, or Jeffrey Archer from the list, obviously that £7,000 is going to become much, much smaller again. Take out the non-fiction writers, the popular genre writers (chicklit, SF, fantasy, romantasy etc) and the pot gets smaller and smaller again. So merely winning the £50,000 prize would be an enormous financial boost to any writer on the list. Even appearing on the list leads to a boost in sales. David Salariya pointed out last year that winning any kind of prize can boost sales by anywhere from 40% to 500%, which is obviously good news for those trying to encourage the world to read their fiction.

So, while you might disagree with the choices of Mary Beard, Jarvis Cocker et. al., the very fact that they sat down and read a whole bunch of contemporary novels, then whittled them down to a longlist, and then a shortlist, all of which received media publicity, as will the decision of who actually wins in November, is a generally good thing for writers.

Is there a counterargument then to the prize culture? Yes, there are quite a few actually. Art is not sport. There’s no empirical method for establishing what’s ‘better’ than something else. Its beauty and appreciation lies ultimately in the eye of the beholder alone. So if you like Dan Brown and think Rachel Cusk is shit, then that’s your choice, and you make it with your own hard-earned cash, and no one can take that choice from you.

And then there’s the posterity argument. Shakespeare didn’t need no prizes, we get told occasionally. Neither did Homer or Dante or Sappho or (insert favourite eternal ancient author here). And while that is true (to an extent – many cultures including the Greeks and Irish had annual competitions for composition in the distant past), it hints at a further implicit argument, that the choices of posterity are likely not to reflect the popularity of the present.

We can see that this is indeed true (again, to an extent.) The best-selling novel in 1922 was If Winter Comes by ASM Hutchinson. It deals with topics like suicide and divorce, which were quite shocking at the time, and was filmed twice. It’s fair to say, however, that nobody is reading If Winter Comes today. By contrast, James Joyce published Ulysses that same year in an edition of just 1000 copies. A century or more later, and it’s on pretty much every university literature course on the planet. Is it well-read? Perhaps not, but a lot of people try every single year due to its immense reputation. Posterity has judged in favour of Joyce and not Hutchinson, despite Joyce never winning a prize for anything.

But to be in the running for posterity’s consideration, it probably helps to have at least some attention while still alive, which was certainly the case with Joyce. It’s also the case with a lot of the Nobel and Booker prizewinners too. There are examples like Emily Dickinson or Franz Kafka whose reputations were all but unknown during their lifetimes, and yet who sprung to a large degree of prominence later, of course. These are largely notable because of how few there are. And one suspects that Kafka and Dickinson might quite have liked a few sales and some critical attention, not to mention maybe a prize, while they were still around to enjoy the acclaim however modest it might then have been.

Generally, the Booker Prize has quite a good track record of picking the same writers that have been accepted by posterity, if we can attribute fifty or so years of reputation as an early judgement of history. If you read down the list of winners from 1969 onwards, there aren’t so many winners who didn’t attract plaudits, success and acclaim for other of their novels also. Quite a lot of them are still highly regarded and well read today. Would Rushdie, Gordimer, Murdoch, Golding, Coetzee, Ishiguro, Byatt, McEwan, Attwood et. al. be so popular today had they not nabbed a Booker? Possibly not.

So it’s likely that Salariya is correct to note that the prizes phenomenon is a kind of necessary evil, drawing attention to the toil and achievement of writers generally, and literary fiction writers in particular. Without them, we might not discuss literature much in the public sphere at all.

Questioning why Pulp singer Jarvis Cocker should be an arbiter of literature is therefore part of the process (and he’s positioned himself in recent years as a curator of artistic experiences so it’s not especially outrageous), as is raising an eyebrow when one judge asserts that “the purpose of literature is to open our eyes to gay sex”. They’re doing their job, which is to redirect frazzled eyeballs in the attention economy to a more worthwhile reading experience. The debate, the outrageous comments, the questionable decisions (Where’s Switzy on the shortlist this year? Why didn’t Ballard win for Empire of the Sun, or Burgess for Earthly Powers?) are all part of that attempt to redirect the general public.

Novelist has increasingly joined poet and some other professions in the kudos economy, where people are rewarded not monetarily but in terms of grudging status. A novel or two is a useful status marker, not unlike a higher degree or a royal honour, in British and perhaps other societies too. In that context, one cannot begrudge anyone receiving a prize that might lift them financially rather than in terms of kudos. Kudos won’t pay that £1400 pcm rent after all.

Posted on

It’s a Shame How Things Sometimes Turn Out

Yesterday, a young man called Hadi Matar was convicted of federal terrorism charges in the United States. He refused to testify in his own defence. The conviction, in a sense, matters little in real terms. His life is effectively over, since he was already serving 25 years for attempted murder in relation to the same action which caused this additional conviction, for which a life sentence is expected.

What did Matar do to attract two heavy sentences? He got up on stage at an amphitheatre where the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie was speaking and attempted to stab him to death, back in 2022. The frenzied assault left Rushdie blind in one eye and very close to death for some time. Thankfully, Rushdie has recovered and is still writing. He now looks like a venerable old pirate.

In this latest prosecution, Matar was accused of terrorism because his murder attempt was alleged to have been inspired by the fatwah placed upon Rushdie in 1988 for the sin of having written his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, which features magical realist scenes in a dream sequence of a very human prophet Mahound who knowingly transcribes demonically inspired verses into his holy text.

That fatwah was placed on Rushdie by the late Ayatollah Khomenei, the theocratic Shi’ite leader who overthrew the Shah and initiated a theocratic Islamist state in Iran in 1979, a state which persists to this day and is, at the time of writing, currently at war with America and Israel. This context among other animosities informs why Hatar faced the additional terror charges.

Rushdie, one may recall, was forced into hiding in 1988 and was on the run for years, under the assumed name of Joseph Anton, itself the title of his memoir of that period of being hunted. This was especially heartbreaking for me at the time, as a young man whose writing had been encouraged by Rushdie, who had offered to show anything I wrote to his own agent. I’ve felt a gratitude and bond to the man ever since.

But when Khomenei died, the Iranian regime distanced itself from the fatwah and Rushdie slowly returned to public life. At the time of the attack, he had been himself again for two decades.

Rushdie had assumed a level of resumed normality which was not shared by some of Khomenei’s more rabid apostles, however. Iranian sponsorship of Hezbollah in Lebanon seems to have been the route by which Matar, a Lebanese ethnic of American birth, was radicalised in this regard. Matar thus threw his life away in the pursuit of Rushdie’s in an attempt to demonstrate his own fidelity to the hatred of Khomenei.

But it’s worth remembering that back in 1983, Salman Rushdie published his third novel, ‘Shame’, about Pakistan. It was nominated for the Booker Prize, which he had already won with ‘Midnight’s Children’ two years before.

But ‘Shame’, in Persian translation, also won a special foreign literature award granted by a jury appointed by the Islamic government of Iran, the same government who then issued a fatwah on his life after he published his next novel, ‘The Satanic Verses’.

We often forget that to hate is very close to love. Before the Islamists of Tehran hated Rushdie, they first loved him. Perhaps the day will come when they can learn to love him again.

Matar has many decades ahead of himself in prison now to ponder his violent actions, his destructive and twisted version of faith, and his own life choices. He could do worse than read the books of the man he tried to destroy.

Posted on

Does the Protagonist wear Prada?

Writers have their little tricks. Nearly all of them use a thesaurus to avoid overusing their favourite words, for example. And some like to dip into a phone book (or its modern equivalent the internet) to generate names for characters.

I’ve been writing fiction on and off for nearly four decades (no jokes about my journalism career please!), ever since Heinemann published me alongside Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, William Trevor and others in their Best Short Stories of the Year anthology when I was still in short trousers, so to speak.

But one thing I’ve never managed to do successfully is dress characters.

Anthony Burgess was a famously terrible dresser, partly because he was colourblind. If you watch him on old chatshow clips, he’s wearing brown shirts with green ties and so on.

But he knew his characters deserved better, so he would get his glamorous Italian wife to tell him what each of his characters ought to be wearing.

That’s what I could definitely use – someone to dress my characters for me. (Not the glamorous Italian wife – I’d need to be on Anthony Burgess level royalties to afford one.)

Posted on

The Satanic Versions of Islam

I was angered but not shocked to hear of the attack on Salman Rushdie. I had been expecting it for decades, as indeed had many others. One of the people who was perhaps not expecting it was Rushdie himself, who seemed to leave behind his ‘Joseph Anton’ alter-ego when he came out of hiding over a decade ago.

I was in Turkey when Rushdie was attacked, surrounded by millions of rather secular Muslims, not one of which would have dreamed of harming Rushdie, no matter how devout their adherence to Islam.

It is in any case entirely reductive to attribute the intolerant attack on Rushdie to Islam itself, given the vast variegation of forms, sects, beliefs and levels of strictness in which Islam manifests across all continents and in almost all nations today. Not that this will prevent commentators from being reductive, of course.

My own relationship with Rushdie was brief, seminal and bittersweet. I was a 16 or 17 year old aspirant writer whose first ever written short story was published alongside Rushdie’s own first ever written short story by the legendary editor Giles Gordon in Heinemann’s Best Short Stories 1988.

The hard-to-find Heinemann hard copy. The paperback Minerva edition was given away by a popular women’s magazine and hence at one point could be found in every secondhand bookshop in Britain.

I met Rushdie around that time, and he signed my copy of the above collection and promised, should I ever complete a novel, to champion it to his agent and publisher, which was very kind. Of course, only a few months later he was in hiding from the kind of people who consider violence a legitimate form of dispute.

And here’s the proof of my cohabitation between the same covers as Rushdie, plus Kureishi, Nadine Gordimer, William Trevor and a whole constellation of writers.

So I have a kind of animus against the Ayatollah, whose inability to tolerate critique led to the fatwah, to Rushdie’s long sojourn in hiding, and also inadvertently to my stillborn fiction-writing career. In any case, to paraphrase Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, besides, the prick is dead.

But alas his ideas, his rigid version of Islam, is not dead. It lives on like an unthinking virus in the minds of many, including the deluded man who stormed a stage at a literary festival to plunge a knife into Rushdie’s 75 year old neck.

I’m neither a Muslim nor a scholar of Islam, but for me it is hard to escape the conclusion that, like every other religion, Islam comes with a day side and a night side. It has transcendental qualities that elevate humanity, and satanic qualities that divide and bestialise us too.

Both of these faces may be encountered, almost too literally, in the two main characters in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, incidentally. Furthermore, we can also see the Satanic version in the depiction of the Ayatollah himself, and in the desacralised prophet Mahound too, recipient of those infamous verses.

I should add that The Satanic Verses is easily Rushdie’s best book, one which presciently examined immigration and religious fundamentalism before they were the only things anyone spoke about. It is often overlooked partly because of the fatwah controversy, and partly because of the enormous popularity of its predecessor, Midnight’s Children. However, you should read it. Firstly because it’s very good indeed, but also because the violent people, the satanic versions of humanity, really don’t want you to.